Column: Surviving August

This weekend marks the last two days of August, and I will be more than happy to turn the page on the eighth month of the year.

Comment

By Anthony GentileSPORTS EDITORagentile@ridgecrestca.com

Ridgecrest Daily Independent - Ridgecrest, CA

By Anthony GentileSPORTS EDITORagentile@ridgecrestca.com

Posted Aug. 31, 2013 at 1:00 PM

By Anthony GentileSPORTS EDITORagentile@ridgecrestca.com

Posted Aug. 31, 2013 at 1:00 PM

This weekend marks the last two days of August, and I will be more than happy to turn the page on the eighth month of the year. My third month at The Daily Independent doubled as the most challenging stretch I’ve had since being brought on as Sports Editor.

The Burroughs Fall Sports poster was the first hurdle to clear — it was sent off in the middle of the month and arrived back in town this week. Before I started working on the 2013 Fall Sports Guide, the poster was the most challenging thing I had done so far.

After this week, the Fall Sports Guide has taken that honor — and it’s not even a discussion. The eight-page guide, which appeared in the B Section of Thursday’s paper, features 15 stories previewing teams and players at Burroughs, Immanuel Christian, Trona and Cerro Coso.

The process of creating the Fall Sports Guide started during the first week of August, when I interviewed Burroughs cross country coach Anthony Barnes. When I interviewed Barnes, he was head coach of the boys and girls team. It’s been so long since that initial interview that Barnes only coaches boys now.

The cross country interview slowly set the Fall Sports Guide in motion. Little by little, I scheduled interviews and photo shoots at local schools. I took a break from interviews to finish the poster, which was in the second week of August, and then continued to focus on the Fall Sports Guide.

There were a lot of firsts during this time. I met a lot of new coaches and players and made my first trip to Trona to see “The Pit,” which seems like it has a playing surface that would not be comfortable to be tackled on, in spite of what the Tornadoes’ players claim.

The preview section dominated my thoughts for most of this month, and this past week it started taking over my time. I had finished a few of the articles prior to Monday and thought I had a reasonable start.

That changed when I arrived in the office on Monday, when I found out that the section was coming out on Thursday. This had always been the date, but for some reason I had it in my head that it would be running on Friday.

It was at that point when the pressure really sank in — the looming pressure of a deadline which felt like a dark cloud centered directly over my head. It was three days until the Fall Sports Guide had to be sent off, and I still had more than half the stories to write and all of the pages to design.

One page was finished on Monday. It featured the Cerro Coso volleyball team and its high expectations headed into the season. I woke up on Tuesday morning wondering when I would get to sleep next, a fear-based question that would be answered later that day and into Wednesday.

Page 2 of 3 - I started Tuesday by interviewing Burroughs football coach Todd Mather, beginning a day that literally never ended. I made two trips to Burroughs, went to an Immanuel Christian football practice and designed the rest of the guide’s back half.

I left the office at 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, knowing that I needed to finish the Burroughs football stories before I went to sleep. And stories is not a misprint — there was an offensive preview, a defensive preview and a preview of the Burros’ season opener against Palmdale among others.

After a quick stop at Jack In The Box for early-morning sustenance, I took a seat at the desk in my kitchen. I was in the midst of my first work-related all-nighter in a number of years.

It started at 2:38 a.m. and ended just more than four hours later with five stories written in a blur. I may have been one of the few people awake in Ridgecrest during those hours, and was unwelcomly joined outside my window by one of the loudest crickets in the history of crickets. He or she was trying to get ahold of someone, and decided that louder and more frequent chirping was the answer.

Once the football articles were done, I went to sleep at 7 a.m. Three hours later, it was back to the office.

Two more stories were written on Wednesday morning/afternoon, and then it came down to the pages. Steadily they all got done starting with the Burroughs’ volleyball page that was probably my favorite design. Apologies to the “Fab Four” for running the serious picture in favor of the all-smiles one they liked, but it was too cool not to.

Burroughs football made up the last two pages I finished, which left the middle space on the front page and one final look over the nearly finished product. By the time I finished reading the Fall Sports Guide for the final time it was 2 a.m. Thursday morning. In a moment that I never thought I would see, the section was sent off.

I exited the doors of the newspaper office shortly thereafter to cap a stretch in which 35 of the previous 40 hours were spent working on the Fall Sports Guide. It was a pair of long days and late nights (which Stephanie Reinke of the production department spent with me), broken up by two one-hour breaks and three hours of sleep.

The cover is a design adapted from the Chicago Tribune, and was the one page of the Fall Sports Guide that I didn’t design. Managing Editor Brad Kester executed the idea perfectly, and the red looks even better on paper than it did on the screen.

The Fall Sports Guide was the most ambitious project I have attempted in my journalism career and I hope it is an enjoyable and visually-appealing read. I am extremely happy with the way it turned out.

Page 3 of 3 - I’m also extremely happy that I am finished with it. The pressures of August have dissipated and I’m looking forward to a poster-less and Fall Sports Guide-less September.